Traditionally, Chicago's nonprofit theaters view the first production of the autumn season, usually in late September or early October, as the tent pole of their artistic marquee. It's a chance to unveil something artistically challenging and substantial before the inevitable winter appearance of Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey.

This year, though, an interesting thing is happening, or, rather, not happening, at both the American Theater Company and Victory Gardens Theater.

There is no fall marquee show.

At the American Theater Company, "Columbinus" is going out on tour, and artistic director P.J. Paparelli has decided the effort and resources thereby required makes it smarter to skip over the usual fall slot back in Chicago.

Meanwhile, the Victory Gardens Theater has rented out its Biograph mainstage to a commercial producer for a September staging of a Holocaust-themed drama, "Signs of Life." The Gardens will itself produce a new play titled "Appropriate" in November; it will nonetheless be the first time in years that Victory Gardens has not come leaping out of the fall gate with a new show.

Que pasa? Two things, I think. We are seeing some significant retrenchment among some Chicago theaters: fewer productions, smaller productions, more restagings. Victory Gardens is hardly alone there.

The Chicago Children's Theatre's 2013-14 season, for example, has only one new show. There's a reprise of "A Year with Frog and Toad" in the fall, and the company is hosting the Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia ("The Very Hungry Caterpillar") in the spring. That leaves just one major production. It sounds very promising — a world premiere musical titled "Mr. Chickee's Funny Money" — but it's still only one show. One show also was all that the Music Theatre Company of Highland Park managed to fully produce during this current season, a cutback from previous years. Times remain tough.

We also are seeing a move away from the subscription model, especially at the smaller Equity houses.

Not many years ago, the Victory Gardens Theater was highly reliant on its subscriber base. The theater would not disclose or discuss the number of current subscribers when I asked them for it this week. But anecdotal reports of empty seats for some productions (others have been hits) suggest that it has declined. In the coming season, Victory Gardens is producing a three-play subscription season, down from four, its practice for years.

American Theater Company also didn't want to say how many subscribers it has on its books. I've been a big fan of much of the artistic work at the theater in the past year or two, most notably "Columbinus," which deserves its national outing. And it should also be acknowledged that ATC in 2012 brought Chicago the world premiere of Ayad Akhtar's "Disgraced," a play that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Those two examples alone demonstrate why this is a crucially important Chicago company.

But I think the ATC subscription season this year is unattractive. Subscribers are being asked to pay for productions of "Hair" and Stephen Karam's "Sons of the Prophet," which is fair enough, but the third and fourth slots on the subscription both are Christmas radio plays: "The Wizard of Oz," which subscribers have only one weekend to see (it's not open to the public) and "It's a Wonderful Life: The Radio Play," which has been around Chicago for years in two competing productions. Rare is the subscriber who at some point has not seen one of them. Doubtless, some ATC subscribers like going back to "Wonderful Life" every year. But two radio Christmas plays making up half the package is, for sure, unusual. Unless your motivation is purely to support the theater, you'd logically buy single tickets to the two new, fully staged shows.

I'd also argue that Victory Gardens, which is slowly turning the Biograph into a curated venue filled with the work of "resident companies," is moving in the same direction. In 2013-14, the Biograph is looking more like a bigger version of Stage 773 and Theater Wit, two multispace theater buildings in Lakeview. One need only look at the company's website. Instead of the "subscribe now" banner you would have seen there in previous years, you can see a series of blocks representing different shows from different theater companies.

Perchance, Victory Gardens is just moving with the times. And no reasonable theatergoer could begrudge ATC the opportunity to showcase its best work out of town. But it indicates a long-standing conundrum in the arts: Theaters have to be flexible enough to shift on a dime and grab chances, but stay busy and consistent enough to become an unbreakable habit for their most loyal audience members.